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I gave up my phone when I read they were tracking devices that happened to be portable phones. It wasn't so much about knowing the facts -- I'd already seen the rough location details on my phone bill -- but that long-forgotten news article or essay gave me the insight on the dangers of having that information available to somebody I don't have the slightest idea who.

Much as he comes off as the nicer guy, I can't see how Obama can win on Nov. 6. The best that can be said about Obama is that he didn't plunge the US in another needless war. He'll probably go down as a transition president, muich like Jimmy Carter in between the Watergate scandal (Gerald Ford doesn't count) and the rise of Ronald Reaganomics. For better or worse, however, Romney is no Reagan.

So answer me this very simple question: Who decides who gets nuclear weapons?

Let me add to that: Why is Israel allowed to have nuclear weapons? Even if we assume that all of Israel's neighbors want to wipe it off the face of the Earth, none of these neighbors currently have nuclear weapons. Israel already has the best military force in the Middle East.

Geeks should vote out Obama because he's the No.1 stooge of Big Media. Obama owes his election to Big Media. Even that supposed bastion of rightwing misinformation, Fox News, has been relatively nice to Obama. Why? Because Murdoch knows Obama and the Democrats have been pushing the Big Media agenda in terms of favorable regulation and persecution. Republicans are less inclined to support Big Media because its conservative wing frowns on the sex, violence, profanities, etc, of pop music and the movies.

5: No "?????" needed. MS would own the enterprise smartphone market, lock/stock/barrel. The only thing MS might have to deal with is the EU (and they can always make a version of Exchange just for that geographic region), but in the US, this would completely shut down Android from the enterprise now and in the future.

No company can succeed by focusing solely on the US. This is something Hollywood, IBM, Apple, etc have known for the longest time. So your Trojaned advice (are you a Google fan in disguise?) isn't gooing to work. Microsoft's best bet for the future is to place nice, act stupid like Romney for a while, then unleash thier killer device/service. I don't know what that is, but I suspects is buried somewhere in Microsoft Research, something 10x awesome than the Kinect that will put Google Glass to shame.

Hybrid rocket engines cannot give you the mass fraction to get into orbit.

And why not? I'm not a rocket scientist, but there's nothing in the literature I've read thus far that says hybrids can't be scaled up.

Those lightweight hulls cannot withstand the temperatures associated with re-entry from orbit.

True. But this has always been a puzzle to me. Why is heat shielding less important going up than going down? Why has nobody invented a spacecraft that can aerobrake without turning into a fireball? "Descent" velocity shouldn't be higher than escape velocity, right?

We'll never, I repeat never, see Star Trek-style transporters because information will always be cheaper to transmit than it is to transport matter. The end point of Star Trek-style transporters requires the reversal of Einstein's famous equation, converting energy back into matter. On the other hand, it is far, far more efficient simply to beam the information that could reproduce (clone) a person out of matter at the receiving station. This is akin to emailing the blueprint for, say, making an iPhone, rather than shipping it to the recipient. At a great enough distance, it would cheaper to clone a person from his or her genetic information using a molecular assembler (a souped-up 3D printer). The clone can then be programmed using the consciousness of the original (mind uploading). Far-fetched, yes. But vastly more energy efficient than effecting a reverse nuclear explosion.

I fear seeing the urban equivalent of the unmanned aerial vehicle. If anything these ULVs (unmanned land vehicles) should be confined to supervised bomb disposal work. No general purpose robocops, please. Would-be drivers should still be tested for their road skills, just as pilots have to be licensed even when it's already possible to fly a plane by autopilot.

But taking your post seriously: I don't expect machines to be smarter than us. Or at least all of us. What I fear seeing in the future are a select class, enhanced via cybernetics or genetics (or both), lording it over the rest of the human race. There would be a kind of cybernetic divide, analogous to today's digital divide, between this enhanced "uberclass" and the non-enhanced, technologically disadvantaged underclass. Of course, this is the dystopian scenario. The singularity could, after all, turn out to be a geek utopia.

While I appreciate (the existence of) the service, methinks this is a trademark suit just begging to happen. I mean take a look at their logo [png graphic]. It really looks like an official Google site. In this age of massive information sharing, I have my doubts about patents and copyrights in general.

However with patents, I'd give the trademark owner the benefit of the doubt (you're not necessarily evil if you sue for trademark infringement), unless your trademark happens to be a pure (uncombined) dictionary word (in English or whatever language) or a common or well-etablished proper name (e.g. Smith or Madonna). Thus, I'd throw out any lawsuits involving Apple(tm) or Oracle(tm) but not Facebook(tm), Microsoft(tm), Apple Computers(tm) or Apple Records(tm). Obvious parodies are another matter, so there might be room for site names like Googlevil.

[*] I'm using trademark in the general sense to refer to symbols or names that make up the business identity of a company.